New World, New Challenges

5GFS/13/5 Townsend Fellowship badge.

'Difficult but hopeful' was the Society’s evaluation of the international situation in 1944, which aptly described its own position as it set out on its post-War work the following year. Many of its arrangements and institutions were outdated and the key features of the period up to 1960 were modernisation, professionalization and a raising of the Society's public profile, all intended to increase membership.

On January 1st 1947, the Townsend Members' Fellowship, for women from the age of 25, was launched to provide ‘a fellowship which older women can enter even if they have not been through all the preliminary stages of growing up in the G.F.S. family circle.'